COVID-19 Forcing Companies To Adapt And Abandon Manual Processes

The current COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the globe has brought with it a variety of challenges that have been different for each and every business. These same businesses have been forced to overcome a common problem in order to enable their staff to work remotely.

For early adopters of cloud computing, this transition will seem like a simple process, many of these businesses have already had staff working remotely pre-pandemic for some time but for the laggards, the rapid transition to a remote working environment will bring with it a unique set of challenges as they are forced to abandon the archaic paper-based processes they have become accustomed to. Still, in many Australia based businesses the processing of expense claims, purchase order and supplier invoices is still completed manually.

When an employee in one of these businesses incur an expense they often complete a manual form, staple receipts then pass it around the office for approval signatures before it lands on the desk of the finance team to key the expense claim into the companies finance system for payment – and yet another manual process appears.

In other businesses, they may already be doing this process online but only by spreading this workload between excel sheets, receipt scans and an email approval chain that’s hard to track at best and provides no visibility to the finance team until it hits their inbox. Errors and duplicate payments in this process are inevitable. There are still many manual touchpoints and hours wasted by the finance team taking their time away from more important tasks – such as managing the companies cash flow, but without full visibility of the companies expenses and invoices, this is a difficult process in itself.

The solution?
With best of breed cloud-based software such as ProSpend this whole process can be brought online, from the capture of receipt images, managers approving claims/invoices from their smartphone based on the companies policies, and data flowing through to your finance system with no rekeying of data or manipulation of flat files. An efficient process is established even with your staff working remotely, and with all of this data now stored securely in the cloud, teams can easily report and analyse spend in real-time.